Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Rambling Unfocused Stream-of-Consciousness Blog

The kids have recovered from their tonsillectomies. Lucy bounced back right away. Bryce had a harder time of it, and it's taken him a few days to get his appetite back. But now he's more or less back to normal, which means he's climbing the walls, getting into everything, and generally driving us crazy.

I'm iblogging from my iPhone again. I don't usually get excited about gadgets and new technological toys, but I think I'm ifalling in ilove with my iPhone. As my friend Troy says, it's like having Batman's utility belt. Or, for a more tortured analogy, it's like a really cool Swiss army knife, except that you can't cut with it (actually that might just be an assumption on my part, I haven't tried using it for that yet). Anyway, imagine a metaphorical utility belt or Swiss Army knife you could add an almost infinite number of tools too without increasing it's mass or weight, and if you could also make phone calls with it, that would be an iPhone.

My iPhone is a camera, photo album, iPod and music library, voice recorder, video player, camcorder, radio, police scanner, GPS, phonebook, flashlight, calculator, web browser, dictionary, game console, alarm clock, children's learning center, and field guide to North American birds. Oh, and I almost forgot - it's a telephone too. With a seemingly infinite number of apps available, its uses are only limited by imagination and battery life.

Plus it has some great birding applications - with the iPhone there's no longer any need to carry heavy field guides around (even Sibley, the heaviest of the heavy, is available as an app). Better yet, it allows you to carry a complete library of bird sounds into the field, with no bulky playback machine or juggling of cassettes/discs. I still need binoculars, but the iPhone does the rest.

Recent bird sightings...last Saturday (11/20) I found a male Anna's Hummingbird in our backyard (bird #140 for our yard, our 7th hummingbird species, an a new addition to my Texas list!). Great Horned Owl was bird #139 (a pair hooting to each other in the early morning hours of September 26th). An AmericanRedstart was seen in a neighbor's yard on October 3rd, and a flock of Snow Geese flew over on November 21st (again I couldn't pick out any Ross's among them, dammit).

The Anna's was the first hummingbird of any kind that I've seen here in weeks. I have five feeders hung around the house, shrimp plant and turk's cap are in full bloom, and I've gone as far as to strategically place bouquets of plastic flowers around the yard, hoping to lure more hummingbirds in.

In other news...November 2nd was a very good day. My family follows politics the way football fans follow their sport, and the midterms were our Superbowl. The two candidates that I contributed to both beat their opponents. California, however, inexplicably re-elected all the same old liberals, ensuring the state's continued slide into the abyss. I just hope that when California implodes it doesn't drag the rest of the nation down with it. How bad are things getting? San Francisco has outlawed the happy meal. There is no joy in Mudville, and there are no happy meals in San Francisco. It's not the meals that San Franciscans are opposed to; it's the children they hate. And their parents - damn breeders. You don't see many families with children in San Francisco - gays, cat ladies, and angry old hippies don't reproduce. I'm telling you, California is a sick fucking place. And I should know - I'm from there.

If you've been following the AMC series "The Walking Dead" you know that in the final moments of the fourth episode ("Vatos") the zombies attack and some people get chewed on. Well it's about time! Over three hours without a single death has to be a record for the genre. Killing zombies doesn't count because of the obvious redundancy - they're already dead. And the horse killed in episode one doesn't count either, gory as it was. My only other problem with this otherwise exceptional series is this: would anyone in their right mind sleep outside in a tent if there were zombie cannibals wandering around? I think not.